


All because of 347 aspirin, Xanax and a little alcohol

by I_Reflect_The_Sun



Category: GOT7
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Anxiety, Bambam ages, Bambam is Sad, CUTENESS SOMETIMES, Depression, Falling In Love, GHOST GHOST GHOST, GHOST GHOST GHOST AGAIN BECAUSE GHOST, Ghosties, Jinyoung is a little bit of an asshole but dont hate me for it, M/M, Mark Is a Ghost, Mark is only sixteen, Panic Attacks, Sadness, Suicide, Sweetness, Underage tag a little strange sorry, Weirdness, baby bambam, forgive me if I missrepresented depression or anxiety/panic attacks in any way I mean no harm, i love them, if you feel the need to correct me on it then please do, kinda soft ending, messed up relationships, no suicide children, please, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 05:03:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14348511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Reflect_The_Sun/pseuds/I_Reflect_The_Sun
Summary: Mark has had a hard life, a difficult one, he lost everything he loved, and in the end, he couldn’t live any longer, couldn’t stand his existence. He took his life, planned it out and left the world in the night.At least that’s what he thought.His reprieve from life lasted a short time, meer minutes before his blurry eyes blinked open again and he finds that he has died and come back, his body no longer a body but a wispy from that keeps him going.The afterlife goes on for him, he never leaves his home, stays where he knows and one day a family moves in, and a boy who makes his afterlife worth living, a boy named Bambam.He finds himself caring for the boy, a meer infant when they first meet, and ad time goes on he finds that he could not live without his little buddy, who lives his life with patience and kindness in his little smile, and loves the hyung without a heartbeat unconditionally, even if he is quiet and strange. After all, not everyone has to have a heartbeat, and not everyone had to be alive to make an impact on you.





	All because of 347 aspirin, Xanax and a little alcohol

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry for how sad this is and how long it is. I personally cried three times when writing it, so if you can make it through, may baby Bambam bless your soul. 
> 
> Enjoy pain and a lot of words :-P
> 
> Also thank you to ma Child Sonia for reading things for me and being supportive you are an angel and I dedicate this pain to you.

Mark was always a shy child. He was a scared child, one who was afraid of every new thing and his dad always took the time to make sure he got to overcome those fears. It was something he hated at the time, but soon he figured out it was for the better. For example, when he first walked with his dad to the convenience store to get milk at age three, he was scared of the dog down the street, and his dad took the time to show him that the guy wasn’t scary, just big. He later learned that Duke was a pit bull, and the only place he would ask to leave the house for was to go say hello to him, but his mom wanted him to stop when she found out the breed.

"But not all dogs of one kind are bad eomma," he had said, and it earned him a smack to the cheek for contradicting her. Young Mark never asked his mother to go see Duke again, only his dad.

Before he could even walk, and far before he could remember, he was afraid of the washing machine, and his father had apparently sat next to baby Mark and the washing machine until he stopped crying, and after that, apparently he didn’t cry about the washing machine.

He's still afraid of the vacuum cleaner. Don’t judge him.

Mark has always been especially afraid of new people with their new words and personalities, their unknown opinions and purely the fact that they were so unknown to him. Mark at five didn’t like the unknown. Other kids were loud, and he would shrink away from them, scoot away and stay quiet until his parents or the other kids own came to save him, or until the other child understood that he didn’t want to talk. Those times always made him sad, because it usually made the other kid feel bad too, and he never wanted that.

In kindergarten, he didn’t speak once, not to his teachers or to his class mates. The first day, he hid in the bathroom while people introduced themselves, and he said nothing when people asked who he was. Sure, little Mark participated, if hesitantly, doing his work and keeping his head down whenever he could, but somehow someone broke through his shy nature in a matter of weeks. A boy named Jackson, new to Korea and the life people led there, and somehow he decided that he wanted to be friends with the young boy too scared to speak to anyone. Jackson spoke enough for both of them, he would rub Marks back when he got overwhelmed by the loudness of the class and he would kiss his knuckles when the elder write too much and got hand cramps, he would sit down and read with him, and even if the other ran off to play with others during recess, he always came back with his cute puppy smile and sat down next to Mark to chatter at him. The quiet little boy did his best to take care of Jackson too, smiling at him and petting the others hair, letting himself be hugged and always taking the time after school to make sure that Jacksons parents or siblings were there to pick him up.

The next year was the first time Jackson heard him talk. 

First grade. Somehow, they were put in the same class again, and while things got a lot harder a lot faster than they would have thought, they stuck together and kept up very well. By the end of the second month of school, Mark said the first thing he ever would to Jackson, at the end of one week when they had to do a project together and had gotten a good grade for it. "Thank you for being okay with how quiet I am." The younger didn’t have time to respond before his elder brother was walking him home, but the next week Mark was a little less quiet, and they actually talked. They started talking a lot, but quietly, over lunch or when they had a little bit of free time before their parents came to pick them up. Jackson chattered with him and he chattered back, filling each others lives with their high pitched little voices.

The next year, Mark didn’t go to school on the first day. He couldn't, the boy didn’t know why but the thought of going made him so scared he couldn’t breathe and his mom had to keep him from hyperventilating on his bed. It made her mad, and that just made his lack of breath even worse, to the point where he passed out. Turns out, he had a panic attack, but he didn’t know what those were at the time and his mother didn’t tell him, so hehad called them dizzy spells. 

As time went on, he stays just as quiet, just as afraid of new things and, a fear he had had sense going to school, just as afraid of failing, but the people he cared about were there for him, and helped him not to be so scared of the world. Middle school was hard, because he only had a few classes with Jackson each year, and by the time highschool hit, there were days were he felt he couldn’t get out of bed, but his mother would make him go to school anyways.

At age fourteen, little Mark developed PTSD.

In one year, his life crumbled, and he lost almost everything he had.

Both of his brothers died coming to pick him up. They were driving down the street to get him from the bus stop when another car came the wrong way and smashed straight into them with a sickening screech and a crunch that still haunt him to this day. He had dropped everything, his bag and books and Jacksons hand-- they held hands a lot to make Mark feel better-- he dropped it all and sprinted to try and help. That was the first time in a long time that he was so fearful that his other fears were blinded. Jackson didn’t move, seemingly too shocked to. He got to the door, struggled to open it, not even seeing what was beyond the glass until he slammed his elbow into it and smashed it so hard that shards were embedded deep in his arm. He didn’t learn they were there for a day and a half. Then he opened the door, and the sight that fell out of the red vehicle was one that shattered him. 

His brother, his hyung, crumpling out of the car with a wheeze and a gush of blood from his mouth and forehead. The elder had slammed his head into the steering wheel, and there was glass all over his clothing. He was looking at a dead body then, and he fell to his poor knees at the sight, fingers reaching aimlessly at the bloody ground like it might help him somehow before he started screaming, something so loud and high pitched it hurt his throat and brought people out of their homes to see him on his knees, Jackson now wrapped around his body, sleeves pulled down and pressed to his brothers lips in a desperate attempt to stop the sight before him. It just made his fingers slippery, made them shake and keep sliding down the other boys cheeks but he didn’t stop trying to hide the sight. He cried and wailed until the ambulances came and dragged the both of them away, Mark kicking and screaming for his now dead brother, wanting to do something, anything. His other hyung is in the car, his neck bent back in a way that was far more than broken and so disturbing that both sights meld into a red mess behind his shut eyes, they mix together into a terrible sight he can't get rid of, and him makes him kick more. Jackson had to restrain him, his writhing body desperate to get into the ambulance and follow them, but he was too young for them to bring along, and that just made his wails and screams so much louder. 

Eventually he goes limp on the pavement, falling out of Jacksons arms to curl up into a sobbing ball, tears falling onto concrete and pooling around his cheek, pressed to the grey stone. The younger boy had laid down on the sidewalk with him, held onto his skinny body as they cried together, Marks eyes shut to the world and replaying the horror he had seen just moments ago. He tries to wipe his eyes, rub at them and he ends up covering his closed eyelids in the blood on his sleeves, on his fingers, the sensation disturbing and scary as he tries to rub that too away, but he fails. They lay like that for a long time, quiet on the ground as they both cry, and when Jacksons mother gets there to ask where he is and why he isn't at Marks, the sight she is greated with must have hurt her so much. Her son and his friend, curled up on the sidewalk, crying with one another, a broken car and a broken boy both on that little street, blood still on the concrete. 

It took a lot for her to get Mark to move, she had to take his hands and lift his head up, and when he stood he couldn’t stop crying into her shirt. They took him home, told his own mother and father and they broke down into tears too.

He wanted his hyungs back, but he wouldn't get them back.

Two weeks later, his sister passed away in child birth and he was even more crushed. His siblings, the people who took care of him and guided him through life, just gone like that, all of them in such a short time. You want to know the most fucked up part? His mother told him to suck it up and go back to school after all that, go back to martial arts and school and perfect grades and friends like his siblings ment nothing to him or her. Six months later, his parents split and he was left with just his mom, and the overwhelming pressure to be a perfect son for her.

That same year, depression hit him like a train, slammed into him and left him unable to breathe or do anything without its looming presence right there, with no motivation and no will to keep going. His mother had none of it; on the mornings when he woke up and said he just couldn’t do it, she would grab him by his shirt collar and drag him off the bed, shove him out the door to face a day when he has no will to even live, expected to be perfect and quiet, polite and smart and everything she wants him to be.

Three weeks before he turns seventeen, Mark kills himself.

The blonde boy goes on the internet one night and calculates how much aspirin he will need to kill himself, 5.3 pills per kilogram, 59 kilograms worth to take his own life. Three days later, he goes to the store and gets a bottle of five hundred pills, stuffs it under his pillow until the middle of the night and then walks into the kitchen to do the deed, to get his painful life over with and fall into the oblivion he thinks he will encounter afterwards, the nothing he imagines filling his vision and letting him not exist.

He only needs 317, but he takes 347 before he collapses, and in minutes he is dead, his heart and lungs stopped, the remnants if the bottle of aspirin still sitting upright on the counter, himself sprawled on his side, three pills in his fingers, one between his lips, a shattered glass of water by his hip.

When he died, he was a shy ghost too.

His eyes blinked open to find that he was on the floor, his limbs still sprawled out, the water soaking his shirt, but he can't feel it. He can't feel the tile of the kitchen, the icy water piercing his hoodie, he can't feel his heartbeat or his breathing, and when he stills his lungs, there is nothing screaming for oxygen. It takes a while for him to sit up, still very confused, and when he does, when he sits up, he sees that his frame is crossing with someone else's. It's his own, he realizes, and then there's a gut wrenching feeling.

He is dead.

But he feels like he is alive. 

He pushes himself back, against the cabinets but his shoulders go through them, the world so cold and lifeless now, intangible. The world looks different, like its seen through some kind of distorting glass, words as though muffled through water, pressing to his eardrums painfully but the pain is also dulled. Mark doesn’t move for a long time, he just watches his dead body lay there, even as the sun begins to rise and shed its distorted, pale rays into the room, his eyes closing at some point to let himself get a grasp on what has happened to him.

They open again to the sound of a woman's screams, high pitched and wailing, too loud and too quiet in his ears as he looks up to find his mother crouched over him, his body. He watches as she picks up his face, but it's not his face, because he doesn’t move, something else does, his body does, but he doesn’t have a body anymore.

He sees the back of his own head, and he sees his mothers crying face as she holds his body. It takes a while for him to stand up, to reach up and have his fingers slip straight through the counter like its nothing, and he tries again, wanting to stand. It doesn’t work, so he pushed himself up, his limbs heavy and awkward yet his form to light, like a wisp of a cobweb in soft winds, a puff to strong and he will be blown away. It's weird, and he doesn’t like it at all, lifting a hand up to look at it and find every part tinted in a pale grey, his hoodie still black and too big on his skinny whisper of a frame.

It's strange, and through his skin he can still see his mother crying over his dead body, pressing kiss after kiss to his face, and he just wants her to stop being so sad.

His ghost follows his body for a week, and it’s the saddest week of his life, because he just keeps seeing his own disgusting face, his sad existence and sad death played before him, Jackson sobbing at his funeral and crying over the coffin. Jaebum is there too, a friend from church who was close with him, his tears silent, and Mark so wants to reach out and wipe everyone's tears, tell them he isn't worth them, because he isn't. Jackson cries the hardest, because had looked up to Mark, but now there is no Mark for him to look up too. 

His mother moves out of their house in only six weeks, leaving him alone with abandoned furniture and the little cat that wanders in the still open back door every once in a while. It's weird to walk through the house with nothing in it, and even though everything is pale and strange, and even though he can walk straight through walls, he makes sure not to, for some level of normality. One day he gets so upset about it, about not being able to touch anything but the floor, that he tries to smash a window, and somehow he manages to, he gets upset and kicks the glass straight out of it. He feels warm air, he can taste the smell of summer on the wind, and he can also smell the way his home is now like dust. 

The blonde doesn’t move for a very long time, enjoying the fact that he can feel without questioning it for a while, and then he lifts his hand to look at it. There is color to his fingers, the skin a soft tan and his hoodie the same pitch black it was the night he killed himself, and they are only slightly see through instead of diaphanous and grey.

Hesitantly, like he is scared it might be fake, he runs his fingers over the sharp edges of the glass, and he can feel them on his skin for once sense his death.

He cries in pure joy, because he can still interact with things, he can smell the world and feel the wind, he feels more alive than he has sense his heart stopped breathing and he decided to take a breath to remember what it feels like, fill his lungs as tears drip down his face, but they don’t fall to the floor. He notices that once they leave his face they disappear as though they never existed, but he doesn’t mind, not at all.

It takes him three weeks to figure out how to get back to the other 'realm' as he calls it, or to the other side of the mirror. He likes the mirror one analogy little more as time goes on. It takes work, but in those next months he perfects it, masters how to go back and fourth, and soon, how to make himself unseen in the real world so that he can still feel yet not be seen. When he gets that one right, he bounces around so hard he knocks over a lamp, and the bulb ends up exploding from the sheer force of his joy. 

He doesn’t know why it makes him happy, but it does and he wouldn’t change this for anything.

The blonde can interact with his surroundings, with the cat when it comes in and with the big pit bull that sleeps in his back yard now. 

Months later, once Mark has gotten up some courage and had plenty of time to think of what to say, he goes to Jacksons apartment, the one his parents got him so he could finish school in Korea while they went back to Hong Kong. He walks straight through the wall, something that always makes him feel weird, and right into the others bedroom to find his dongsang watching television on his bed, laughing at something, no sign of tears on his face or sadness in his dark eyes, and Mark lets himself be seen, but it takes a couple minutes to be noticed.

In fact, he walks over to the foot of the others bed and falls down on it right next to him, and the scream that Jackson gives at the movement and the bounce of his head is just so Jackson he can believe it. The other scrambles to stand up, and he looks down at Mark like they both have gone utterly insane.

"…hyung?", pops out of the others mouth after a while, a tiny word that holds so much weight as the blonde looks up at his young friend.

"Hey Jackie," he whispers, and he can see big fat tears forming in Jacksons eyes before the other throws his weight onto the elder male, squeezing him so hard in his strong arms that for a second he us afraid of being crushed to death. Then he remembers he is dead, and just focuses on hugging Jackson right back.

"Where did you go," the other boy mumbles almost an hour later, his tears having stopped and no other words having been exchanged, just tight cuddles and the feeling of warmth pressed against Marks wispy form.

"You don’t wanna know," he mumbles, nose pressing to Jacksons shoulder until the other pulls back, and he knows he is going to have to admit it out loud for the first time. He doesn’t give the other time to speak again before he does so, the words spilling off his lips. "I died."

Jackson stares at him, his dark eyes filled with pain, with sadness, and he whispers, "Why."

"I couldn’t handle it anymore."

"But you could have told me. You could have come to live with me, I would have taken care of you. You didn’t have to-"

"You don’t know what I really went though, Jacks, and I don’t want you to. We can't change the past."

"But hyung…hyung, why did you just leave me like that."

"Because I couldn’t stand living."

"Then…what are you?" Mark doesn’t in know what to think of the question, and he looks down at his skinny frame, the space he takes up. It's not a body, it doesn’t feel like one, and so it isn't, but still it exists. It's something, just like Mark himself.

"I'm me."

Jackson goes quiet, moves to press his ear to Marks chest and hugs his skinny waist tightly, but there is no beat there for him to hear, so the blonde fakes breathing for the other, to give him something to feel and hear in his chest. His fingers comb carefully through soft hair, just the way Jackson always liked, back from his temple to the base of his neck and then up in the back to do it all over again. No one says anything else that night, and Jackson falls asleep like that, on his chest. 

The blonde leaves in the early morning, before Jackson wakes, and that is his final goodbye to his best friend, because the last one wasn’t enough. 

It's hard to walk out of that house, though. It smells like Jackson, like his warm skin and his smile, the autumn leaves they used to jump in back in kindergarten, the cologne the other started wearing in seventh grade, his joy and kindness and everything Jackson in nature. He doesn’t slip back out the door until he has written something for the other, something for him to keep, in Chinese so that even when the other is old and grey, he will still be able to read it.

Hey Jacks, it's ya boy Mark :P

Sorry, wanted to try and be light, but that’s not easy when you are dead. I'm sorry that I left, and that I committed suicide, and that it took me so long to come and visit you after I turned all ghosty and stuff. I just wanted to let you know I love you like you are my family, because you really are. You're my best friend, my brother, my caretaker and my child. You helped me grow up and you never left, and for that, you can never know how grateful I am. 

Please don’t be sad when you read this, but also please don’t throw it away, because you need to know that a lot of what I have thought about sense my death is you and my Hyungs, how much I love you all and care about you. It makes me smile dispite how depressed I have been for years.

Live a good life, Jackson-ah. Love with your whole heart the way you always have, be there for people and protect them with that sweet smile of yours. Tell people how you feel, talk about your issues, give your mom kisses and your dad kisses too, love your siblings. Don’t be sad that I'm gone, just remember me for who I was, okay?

I'm gonna go now Jackie. Love you. Never stop smiling when your happy and talking when you want to. 

-Mark hyung (because I will always be your hyung don’t flipping forget it).

The walk back to his house is a quiet one, and he finds himself crying, tears rolling down his cheeks at seeing Jackson so okay without him. His little Hong Kong fencer would be okay without him. That’s all he had really wanted. 

He doesn’t leave his bed for days after that. 

It's not really his bed anymore, just the mattress he slept on in his old room, but it's where he lays for not just days, but weeks after he leaves Jacksons life for good. His body won't drag himself around the room, won't even let him lift his head for more than a glance over at the sky to see what time of day it is, and he just can't get himself up. He has had many days like this sense his death, days where he didn’t have it in him and so he finally let himself feel his depression in its fullest extent, the empty sensation in his body that sucked all of his happiness away for the time being. It comes back eventually, but it takes a little while.

One day someone moves in, a little old woman with a sweet smile and wrinkles across her beautiful face, her glasses always hung around her neck. She likes purple, and she fills his home up with flowers and paintings, pretty candles of every color and smell, postcards from her nieces and nephews, blankets and pillows and warmth that had been lost in the past months without his family. The home smells like ivory and cinnamon, and he loves it, he loves every bit of it, and the only bad part is he can't interact with this woman, but even that has a couple advantages. Her age seems to have messed with her memory, and once he learns this he starts to cook for her so she doesn’t have to, he takes out her trash, cleans the counters, makes sure her medications are where they belong. He takes care of her and his life has meaning, has a purpose. 

One day, she catches him taking out her trash, but she doesn't panic or scream, in fact, she does quite the opposite. She gives a quiet squeak and then takes his hands into her bony little ones, looking at him with those dark eyes of hers. 

"Oh Jooheon, I wasn't expecting a visit from you! Oh, it's been so long my little Joo! Come, give your little grandma a hug!"

Mark is stunned, but he accepts the hug, and the fact that she thinks he is her grandson, using his voice for the first time in a while and letting himself become a part of her life after he learns that her grandson and daughter haven't come to visit in almost thirteen years. He doesn’t mind the new name, the hugs and conversations, the excuses about where he has been and how he goes to college at night, the strange things he does to make her happy, in fact, it's quite nice to live normally. 

He lives with her for years, almost sixteen before she passes away in her sleep and he feels immense sadness at the loss of his companion, his only one. It's even sadder when no one notices for almost three days, and he sits at her side the whole time, holds her cold hand and watches her little face slowly decompose in her bed, warm and smiling even upon her death. His depression had gotten better with her there, and while he still had days where he couldn’t get out of bed and days when he felt so empty it hurt his insides, they were less frequent and having them hurt much less with her around to worry over him and pet his hair.

Once she leaves, he has a severe bout of it, and if he hadn't already been dead and didn't need to eat or drink, he's almost sure he would have died like that, alone in his bed, watching from his little greyed mirror world as people came in to remove her things, steal his safety and the good things in life from him.

They leave behind a closet filled with candles and knitted blankets, all soft and reminiscent of her, of the life he had with her, but he wasn’t alive. He had simply shared a space in he life and seen her little smile at every chance he could. 

It's months before another family moves in, but when they do, Mark doesn’t know what to think, how to feel, whether he wants them gone or welcomes them.

A pregnant mother and her husband, a baby boy and a bright outlook on their lives. He stays hidden, yet in the real realm-- he likes it better there, because he can smell things and feel them, he can sense heat and truly hear the people speaking their secrets to the walls and the ones they love. One night, a few days after they move in, he walks into the babies room, a little boy who he knows as Beer, in the room down the hall from the one he had been in for so long and still stays in, and he looks down on the little sleeping boy, watching him quietly as he sleeps, and when the little tyke opens up his dark eyes, he makes himself visible, thinking maybe he can be his imaginary friend or something, but the poor boy starts to cry and wail, and he does so until Mark disappears again. It's heartbreaking to him, and he curls up in the closet of his now empty room, in his cold veil, thinking that his afterlife is over for now. The family isn't leaving any time soon, he can feel it, and he doesn’t know what to think about it. Maybe he can just watch them, see how they live their lives and watch the kids grow, watch their mother age slowly and their father do the same, see their friends come and go.

Their next child is a baby girl, and then another boy, both beautiful and sweet, yet both are loud and happy too. The blonde doesn’t say hello to them in the night in their infancy, but once the girl catches him looking out the window in his room and she starts to cry and panic, so he hides himself, and the sight of her teary little face makes him cry too, quietly, as she calms herself and then walks to the bathroom. He hears her wash her face, but she never says anything about him. 

It's the last boy born who really responds to him. His name is Bambam, and he is such a tiny thing when he comes into the world, a tiny little thing with dark, dark eyes and a soft fluff of hair on top of his head. The little one is put into his room, the one all the way down the hall, and Mark stands at his bedside every night to watch over him, to protect him as he sleeps and maybe give him good dreams. In reality, it's obvious it does nothing, but he doesn’t care, he just wants to watch the little boy in his room and see his sweet little face. He knows how much his positivity can affect the world, and how much his sadness or anger can too, but he doesn’t think it does much with the living.

One night Bambam cries. First he whimpers, jerking his tiny little limbs so hard that he bumps the mattress and startles Mark, who stands by his side, and then the poor little thing starts to cry, his eyes blinking open and then filling with tears, face scrunching up as he whimpers and lets those tears fall across his tiny baby cheeks. It takes a moment before Mark decides to show himself, hesitantly, his blonde head appearing and those dark little eyes clear a little. Bambam cries a little less, and it’s the first time a child has responded so well to him after his passing, so he just stares, and when the tiny angel reaches for him, he can't deny him. Skinny hands reach down, gently, carefully, and hook under Bambam's tiny arms, sit him up a little and then cradle his bum in one hand, his head in the other, his own movements so gentle and careful that he might as well be dealing with glass. Actually, that’s exactly what he is doing, because a child is so fragile.

The little black haired baby stops crying once Mark has him cradled against his chest, one hand on the back of his little neck to keep his head supported as he sways lightly from side to side. Those dark, dark eyes look up at him, big and curious and adorable, and the blonde knows this is what he missed out on in life, he missed out on holding more children, holding his own children and watching them grow up. The thought bring tears to his eyes and he stifles a sniffle, looking down at this sweet angel and slowly, slowly sitting down on the ground, his back to the wall, just holding this child in his arms and crying quietly. He always wanted a child of his own, to adopt one or have a surrogate, to see them smile and sleep, teach them how to talk, play with them and guide them up through life, be a good dad and raise a good child.

A chubby little arm reaches up to his face and it’s the first time a living person has tried to wipe his tears sense he died because it's the first time he has cried in front of a person. Bambam keeps trying, at least he thinks that’s what Bambam is trying to do. He doesn’t succeed, his arms too short, but Mark takes the time to wipe his cheeks on his shoulders and then lean closer, until Bambam can touch his face, his tiny little fingers poking at his cold skin and then pulling at his lips lightly.

"Hello," he whispers after a long while, Bambam sitting curled in his arms quietly when he says it, and his own quiet voice earns a tiny little burble from the little angel, a burble that makes his heart melt. He wants to take care of this child, Bambam, to watch him grow up and succeed in life, be a good parent and have kids of his own many years in the future when he is ready. He wants to be his imaginary friend, his guardian angel from the grave, and that’s what he does. After he puts the little boy back into bed that night, he is so attached to him that it could be seen as sad but he doesn’t care. He has a new reason to continue on, something to exist for and something that knows he exists. Most nights they sit together, Mark holding Bambam, whether he wakes or not, enjoying the tiny angels warmth and his sweet face, the way he burbles and pokes his cheeks, wants to get closer and gets sad when he is let go even for a moment. 

Mark has a reason to live his afterlife, and even if he is a shy and quiet ghost, he loves Bambam and would do anything to protect the little kid.

••••

Mark remembers Bambam's first words. He remembers his first steps, the first time he poked his nose, the first time the other stood up for him. Mark remembers all of it, he loves all of it, because in the night, when Bambam wakes up to say hello and motions to be lifted out of his crib, it's like he is one of the little boys guardians. When Bambam plays in his room during the day, Mark is there with him, playing with him and offering his smiles, teaching him to speak Korean and helping the growing child grow his vocabulary. Bambam can read by the time he is three because of Mark, and every day the little boy tries to read him something, even if it's just a clipping from the paper or the back of a juice box. 

The blonde always makes sure that he isn't seen or felt when Bambam's parents or siblings come by though, he makes absolutely sure that the others don’t know he exists, to scared of scaring them or loosing the reason he gets up in the bright morning. He just wants to take care of Bambam, to protect him, to cover his face in kisses and make him giggle with jokes or tickles or anything, really, as long as it make the little boy smile.

"Why don’t you want eomma or appa or Bank-hyung yo see you?", the boy asks one night when Mark is watching him sit in his too-big bed, his chin rested on its edge as Bambam plays with the ears of a stuffed giraffe. It's a good question, and it takes him a long time to answer, but Bambam has always been patient with him, so he moves to crawl into Marks lap as he thinks, waiting for an explanation as he plays with the blondes fingers instead of the giraffes ears.

"Bambam, do you know what I am?", Mark asks hesitantly, looking down at the top if Bambam's little head with worried eye, and the other nods immediately.

"You are my hyung. You have cool skin and a pretty smile and those pretty little three dimen-dimen-"

"Dimensional."

"-Three dimensional freckles on your forehead. You are cool and fun and special. You're a special person," the little boy finishes, tilting his head back to look up at the elder boy , and he leans down to kiss the others forehead gently. "Did I get that right?"

"I don’t think so, Bamster," he says, and the boy looks up at him more, curiosity in his eyes.

"Then what are you?"

"I'm a ghost, little one."

Bambam is silent for a minute, and then he says something that makes Mark way too soft for his own good. "You're my favorite ghost, even more than Casper the friendly ghost, because you're more than friendly. You're my hyung."

"Thank you."

They sit quietly for a couple minutes, Bambam snuggling closer and warming Mark up with his little body, and the elder realizes he never answered the black haired boys question.

"I don’t want eomma or appa to see me because I'm a ghost, and they won't want to stay with a ghost. They will move, and I don’t think I want you guys to move."

"Oh, okay... Thank you for telling me hyung."

"No problem Bam."

Bambam crawls out of his lap again, and the blonde helps him up onto his bed even though he doesn't need to anymore, his hand coming up to let the boy step on it and then boost himself up. He remembers their conversation about it one night, and the thought that Bambam might not need him as much as he grew up had made him so sad, but then the boy had gotten up and come over to put those little hands on his cheeks, patting them lightly. 'Do you want to keep helping me?' He had nodded, still looking at the ground. 'Why, hyung?'

'It…it makes me feel like I'm doing something good, like I'm taking care of you. It makes me happy.' The other had nodded, smiling at him and then kissing his forehead sloppily, and in the minutes after he stood at the edge of the bed until Mark realized what the other wanted and he helped him up. 

The little boy only ever wanted the best for people, he wanted to see them smiling, happy and healthy, and while he definitely made sure the rest of his family was happy, Mark seemed to be the biggest priority, because dispite the fact that he smiles a lot, he also gets worried a lot, so his smiles rarely last long, but most of the time the boy is there to help him smile again.

Now Bambam is laying in his bed, his dark eyes on Marks blonde head, almost as though he is watching him think and then he asks a tiny question, one that melts Marks heart all over again, and at this point its constantly mush for the little boy. "Can you come up here with me?"

Mark stares for a moment, but this is a different kind of stare, and its like Bambam can read his mind as he adds, "I don't wanna be alone."

That has the blonde crawling up in bed with him, and the tiny boy wraps himself around Mark tightly, his nose pressed into the black fabric of his hoodie as though breathing in the fridgid scents of the realm he hides in during the day. "Good night Bambam."

"Good night Hyung."

That night he lays in bed with a sleeping boy in his arms, listening to his breathing and feeling his strong little heartbeat against his chest, and he thinks that this is how life should be, how he wants his life to be, just like this.

••••

Over the next year, Bambam asks a lot of questions about Mark and his life, and the blonde is patient and answers every one of them when they are asked.

"How old are you, hyung?" Is asked one morning over Bambam getting his hair brushed.

"I'm sixteen."

When the boy turns four, his parents start to leave him at home during the day, something that Mark disposes them for and thanks them for at the same time, because no parent should do that, but it means he gets more time with the young boy. 

He teaches him how to make breakfast so that he can do it himself, even though Mark never lets that happen. He feeds the young boy well, and takes good care of him, at least that’s what he thinks.

"Hyung, what's your name?"

"My names Mark. You can call me that if you like."

"Can I call you Mark-hyung, or Markie, or just hyung?"

Of course."

He didn’t realize until the black haired boy was four that he didn’t know Marks name, but he doesn’t mind, and its cute how the young boy pronounces it 'Mak' when he gets excited and doesn’t find the time to pronounce the R.

"Hyung, how did you die?"

Marks head turns to look at Bambam, a book in his lap, dark eyes staring at him in a way he can't understand.

"Why…do you want to know?"

"I just wanted to. You don’t have to tell."

"I…how do I say this…"

"Take your time."

A beat of silence. "I took my own life."

"Why?"

"All my siblings died and I couldn’t live."

"I can be your brother if you want. I know its not the same, but still…"

"I would like that."

"Okay."

When Bambam turns five he starts going to Kindergarten, and while Mark misses his little pattering feet in the day and the way he would sleep in for hours pressed to his side, it's a whole new experience to help him up in the mornings, brush his hair for class and smell his breath to make sure its clean. He gets up to do it ever day for almost four months, and then he can't.

He remembers that day well.

It started with little pattering feet.

Bambam reaches up a little hand, still so tiny compared to the bunches of fabric that his fingers grab onto and even tinier compared to Marks own hand, the little boy tugging gently at the material as he blinks open dark eyes, although he wasn’t asleep. He doesn’t sleep. He is dead, after all. "Hyung, come on, it's time to get up," the younger says, a little smile on his face, and Mark shifts his hand so that he can hold those tiny fingers between his own. 

"I guess it is," he whispers quietly, making no move to get up, and Bambam tilts his head to the side, curious at the difference in behaviour. They had known eachother for the youngers whole life, yet Mark had never done such a thing before. He always got up when asked by the younger, and he never seemed so sad and flattened.

"Are you going to get up?", the brunette asks in a small voice, and the bigger male retracts his hand, pushing his lips into a tired little smile. 

"I'm not up to it today Bam, I'm sorry," he admits, looking down in shame. He hates the days when he can't move, he has always hated them, but he hates them more now, and it's not like he can control his depression, especially if he can't take anything to stabilize himself. It's been getting worse lately, and he has a hard time putting on smiles for Bambam now. It's a dark time for him, and he feels bad for letting the other see, but he can't stop it.

"That's okay. I understand. Sleep well," the other says, getting onto the bed to pull the blanket up on the blonde boys shoulders and then kiss his cheek, his tired smile a little more real now. "I'll make some breakfast for when you get up."

"You don’t have to. Remember, I don’t eat."

"Oh, right. Well, ill see you after school then. Feel better soon." The boy crawls off the bed, walking to the door and waving at Mark one more time.

"Have a good day kiddo. Bring home a book so we can read later," he calls quietly as the other moves to close the white door, but he pauses to stick his cute little face inside once more.

"I'll bring one home, but I'm reading to you. Bye now, hyung."

Then he is gone, and Mark shuts his eyes again, his cold body curled under covers that fall through him now, because he doesn’t want to interact with them right now, so he won't. He doesn’t want to move, so he doesn't, the blonde just lays there, face pressed through a pillow, the smells of the real world fading with the urge to touch anything, the heat it gives off being replaces by a ghastly cold he doesn't care to fight against. He lays like that for two days, and the only time he lets himself be seen is when Bambam calls his name as he comes home from school and when he asks to cuddle at bed time.

Bambam losses his father days later, and the little boy is devastated, so devastated that he doesn’t even want to sit up for school in the morning. His mother has to come in and wake him instead of Mark, and the sight of the little boy looking so upset hurts his whole frame, every bit of his form that is far too light. 

At night he whispers to the young boy, pets his hair the way he used to with Jackson and talks to him about how it will be okay, how he will be okay and things will get easier, and after a little while, the young boy gets back to being okay. There are times when he cries for no reason, when he just bursts into tiny heart-wrenching sobs and Mark will bring his shaking form into his lap carefully, cup his little cheeks and wipe his tiny tears away with gentle fingers. Bambam will sometimes cry for hours like that, often in the middle of the day or right as he is trying to go to bed, whispering to his blonde hyung about how he wants his father back, and Mark tells them that he will be okay, that his hyung will make sure that everything is okay, that he is up in heaven looking down on his son and his ghost friend.

Mark tells him he's an exists, but he still has no idea, because he never went there.

On those nights, when the other falls a sleep with sniffles still high in his throat and cheeks streaked in salty residue, he is reminded of Jackson and his brothers, of the life he really lived, and he wonders how Jackson is doing, wants to go visit him and hug him again, but it's been too long for him to do something like that. It would probably just hurt to see him anyways, and he doesn’t need to be a depressed fuck when he has poor, grieving Bambam to take care of. When the young boy inevitably has nightmares of abandonment or other scary things, Mark makes sure to hum to him and soothe the furrow between the boys brow, careful to pay attention for when it happens to help as quickly as possible. It's not easy to tell when people are having nightmares unless thet are full on night terrors, most of the time people just don’t show thet are upset in their sleep, and if they do, it's something tiny. For example, Bambam's furrowed eyebrows, or the tiny frown on his lips, when Bank tilts his head back some, when the families father would make little huffs in his sleep, when Baby clenches her little hands. 

Dark eyes blink open, little lashes glittering with salt in the faint light form the street lamps in front of the house, and those little hands grip onto his hoodie tightly. His own arms pull the little boy up some, resting his head on Bambam's shoulder and letting the sleepy boy do the same to him, the soft sound of him humming a melody from his childhood now pressed to the side of the young boys head, soft hair poking at his skin from a recent haircut.

They don’t move for a long time, the both of them blinking into the dark until Bambam asks a question, a morbid one but one he seems determined to know with the way he scoots back a little to look at his hyung. "What is it like to die, Hyung?" Mark chews his lower lip carefully, looking at those big brown eyes for a moment and then down at the bed, unsure how to respond, but this time is different than all of the little boys other questions. He pokes Marks cheek until he turns to face him again, and then asks once more, "What is it like to die?"

Another beat passes before Mark speaks, looking back at the pale pillow below their head, his words as small as Bambam's own, but he knows the other is hanging on his words.

"I don’t know about how others…how it feels for other people to die…but when I did, it didn’t hurt at all. Well, it did a little bit, but I took a lot of aspirin and drank a lot of water without any food, so it gave me a stomach ache, but that was it…" Another moment of silence, his hope that it will suffice dwindling until he continues, those big brown eyes still on him. "I fell down, and then when I woke up I wasn’t breathing. You know how I don't have a heartbeat? That was kind of what happened, and it was weird, and when I tried to get up I felt all…weird. Like my arms were heavy but like I could just float away. You just go to sleep, and then you wake up, only when you do you're just not alive anymore, and you just keep going, but somewhere that people can't see or talk to you."

Bambam is quiet for a long time, and he moves his little hand to press to Marks neck, right where you should be able to feel a pulse, and the teenager tilts his head back to let him until the hand moves down to his chest, no pulse to be found in whatever it is that his conscious resides. 

"Is it scary?"

"A little, but it's more confusing. In fact, I had hoped that there would be nothing when I passed, because I didn’t want to feel sad anymore, but once I stopped being confused, I was just sad again."

"Are you still sad now?"

"Sometimes," Mark admits, trying his best to give the boy a little smile and lighten the mood some, the way Bambam usually goes with.

"I wonder what you would feel like with a heartbeat, and warm skin," the boy mumbles, cuddling up against his chest again and hiding his nose against Marks shoulder.

"I would probably feel like a 40 year old man."

They giggle together quietly, and eventually Bambam falls back to sleep, only to be woken in the morning to go to class, Mark hiding in his cold little realm when it happens to let Bambam's mother take her sweet son to school for the day. Bambam glances over his mothers shoulder in search of his blonde hyung, but his hyung isn't there, he is watching though, and he can see the other waving a little.

He seems lighter.

Or maybe that’s just what Mark wants to see.

••••

Years pass by quickly, but to Mark they don’t seem to go by quite as quickly as they did before, because he takes the time to notice everything and take care of Bambam. As he grows, the blonde is there to help with his homework and his spelling, teach him more words and math and how to clean his room in the easiest ways. 

In some ways, he is a guardian, and in others, he is a friend and a brother, someone to play with and try to tickle, color and learn with. Soon Bambam is turning ten, his skinny frame filled with vibrancy and light, like he could just bounce all the time and sing and dance, but still have that much energy regardless. He is kind and compassionate, and it’s a pleasure to be around him, to watch him grow up like this, to see the friends he has made and the things he has learned all on his own, in school and in life. The boy isn't home as much, but when he is he seems to spend every spare minute with Mark, chattering to him and being affectionate. Summers are both of their favorites, because while Bank and Baby both have part time jobs and Beer has to go to summer classes, Bambam gets to stay home and the both of them do dumb things together.

Mark wouldn’t trade it for anything, but then he learns that Bambam really isn't as happy as he seems. 

He finds one night, when the younger wandered to the bathroom, that he had taken almost a half hour in there for the twentieth time in a month and the hundredth in the past year, and it was something that worried the blonde, so he went to check on him, and he had found the boy crying on the floor, unable to breathe. 

He was having a panic attack.

The blonde hadn't known what to do, he had stepped inside quietly and sat on his knees in front of Bambam but the other couldn’t seem to see him through his tears and the dizzyingly fast breaths he was taking, so the elder had reached out a hand to touch the boys shoulder, and the jerk that came of it made Mark flinch back some. Watery eyes had looked at him through those fast breaths and then shaking fingers reached out for the hand that was still hanging in the air, had pressed it against the youngers eyes and kept on crying.

"Bam…how do I help?", he asked quietly, because even though he had gone through panic attacks in the past, he knew that not everyone needed the same things during one. Some needed touch, something to ground them and something to distract them from destructive thoughts, while others needed to not be touched, needed to get through things on their own. Still others needed to be spoken to, distracted, or to get somewhere warm and safe, to do something that relaxed them or hear music or something.

"I-I don't - don’t know hyung," the younger had stuttered through tears, and when Mark had moved a little closer, Bambam had done something he hadn't done in almost five years. He crawled into the blonde boys lap and burried his face in the dark fabric of his hoodie, scooted over and pulled himself as close as humanly possible to his ghostly friend, his body shaking as skinny arms wrapped around the smaller male. He had said nothing, not a word, not a noise came from him because he didn’t want to make things worse, so he sat there and held onto the boy, rubbed his back and his hair, started to take silent breaths to give the other a pace with which to match his breathing.

It didn’t take long for the boy to relax against his chest, for his crying to quiet and his breaths to steady again, but they didn’t move form that spot for at least another hour, just holding onto each other, the blondes skin warming up to body temperature from the heat they shared and his arms staying tight around the smaller male.

"I'm sorry." It's the first sentence uttered sense they started hugging, and Bambam's words sound so tiny that might as well fade into the background, but they don’t. Instead they stab at the blonde males insides, make him hold on tighter.

"Sorry is for when you have done something wrong. You haven't," he whispers against the younger males soft hair, strokes the back of his head carefully and murmurs soft incoherent words to the younger, ones in English and Chinese that make no sense but feel more soothing the both than any whispered Korean. Eventually Bambam has to get up and get ready for school, and as Mark sits on the toilet to watch him, he can feel that the younger hates what had happened, hates that he had shown weakness. Before the younger heads out to get dressed, he pulls him into a hug, one from behind as he whispers into the others hair, "I'm here if you need me. You're not the only one who deals with them."

Granted, Mark hadn't suffered one in many years, but still, he understood, and when the brunette relaxes some, he hopes the other will come to him when he truly needs it.

He does, many times. There are nights where the boy can't fall asleep and seems ready to break down right in Marks arms, so he whispers whatever he can think of, stories and melodies and comforts, words that make no sense except for their soothing tone. Other nights the younger has them in his arms and he lets him cry his heart out and struggle to breathe, his breaths measured and slow, careful and deliberate, and soon the other falls back to sleep again. 

He no longer sees the Thai boy as a vibrant child, he sees him as someone who struggles just as much as anyone, someone who has been affected by the death that surrounds his life, and while he feels bad and like he might have been the cause of some of it, he also knows that it wasn’t all him and that he has done a lot to help the boy be at least somewhat okay. 

The others panic attacks appear to occur less frequently in the following months, going from at least three a week to one, and then to one or two a month, at least the ones at night. Still, in the beginning, when Mark makes the other write down when he has them on a calendar, it saddens him how often they occur, three to five a week, most at school it seems. 

"How the hell do-"

"Language please."

"How on earth do I get rid of them, hyung? Why do I keep having them?"

"Your fathers death made you anxious right Bambam-ah?"

The other nods slowly, crossing his legs on the bed and looking at Mark, who sits at the foot of the bed with a pencil twirling in his fingers.

"Those anxieties sometimes get so bad that your heart and your mind think something is really wrong, they tell you that something bad is going to happen, and you start to freak out. Different people feel differently during them. For me, I can't breathe and the world spins no matter how hard I close my eyes. My hands tingle. I don’t like to be touched, but I like to hear people or words or music, and sometimes if they get bad enough I feel like I'm going to die."

"I like to be held when it happens." Mark offers a little smile, a half one, nodding in agreement before the young boy continues to speak. "I can't breathe, but a lot of times I'm worried I'll fail, or that I might come home, and have lost someone. It's a scary feeling."

"It's one of the worst ones for me."

"But hyung, how do I get rid of them?"

He scoots closer, around the brunette to hug him against his chest, the other melting into his touch and hooking little fingers on his wrists gently, a blonde head coming to rest on a narrow shoulder. It's a while before he speaks again, his voice much more quiet when he does. "Think of things that soothe you. I like running water, and sunshine. Puppy dogs, my dads laugh, Jacksons beautiful smile and his bone crushing hugs, Jaebum's warm hands. Those kinds of things."

"Who…who is Jackson?" There is something in the others tone that he can't read, but the blonde doesn’t think about it, instead starting to talk of a boy he loved like family and knew better than any other person aside from maybe Bambam. 

"He was my best friend. I still consider him to be. He got me through a lot of pain after my siblings passed, and through a lot of anxieties before then, when I was just a nervous kid to scared to even talk." Bambam snuggles closer, and the elder shifts a little to give him some room. "He was from Hong Kong, and he spoke six different languages. His smile could make anyone happy, and his hugs always helped me relax, so that’s why I think of him."

"Oh." The other looks down, that same something in his words, but the blonde doesn’t know what it is. "Do you miss him?"

"Yes, all the time. He was my rock, how could I not miss him."

There is a short stretch of silence, and while it isn't very long, it seems awkward and sad, bordering on upset even. Instead of face it, Mark asks a question to the younger boy, looks down at his cute little face and asks, "Is there anything that helps you relax when you aren't anxious?"

"Yeah," Bambam mumbles with a nod, "Vanilla. Hugs from mom. This one song, Back by infinite. You. Mostly you."

"Can you try thinking of those when you are starting to get one? Just think of your mom or me, maybe even put on that song and see if it helps."

"Okay, I will hyung. Thank you."

"No need to thank me until it works."

In a year, it seems that the others panic attacks stop before they start, pushed away by soothing thoughts, calm words and cool hugs. He can't exactly give warm ones, but if those are what he needs, he goes to his sister or mother and gets them from one of them. Bambam rarely needs those though, he is usually okay with the ones he gets from Mark, the ones accompanied by soothing hair petting and a kind presence.

Years pass by in a blink, a blip in time filled with countless memories, and every minute is enjoyed by Mark. He loves Bambam, the same way he loved his brothers and his mother, the way he loved Jackson and Jaebum, as well as the woman he lived with, he loves his little buddy with the sweet smile and the big heart, his cuddly nature and quiet understanding. Their lives pass by together, and as Bambam grows into a teenager of fifteen, he starts to tease him about finding a girlfriend, asking about crushes and pretty people, even pretty boys, not caring what the younger males presence. He is beautiful, those same chubby cheeks still there, sweet under his cheekbones, lips plump and adorable when they pull into that smile. 

The brunette is no longer black haired but blonde, a brighter blonde than Mark, a bleached platinum that matches who he is. Thet still cuddle at night, and Mark helps him do his makeup in the mornings, gives him hugs before he heads off and forehead kisses the way a parent would before big tests. When the other asks if he looks okay in the morning, the answer is always, /always/ yes, because he does, no mater what. But that’s not why he does it.

It doesn’t matter if he thinks the other looks bad, or doesn’t like the outfit he is in, if the younger boy feels good, then he looks good. That’s that. Fuck what Mark thinks, if Bambam can look in the mirror and feel good with makeup on in some pink sweater, then he looks fantastic. If he has winged eyeliner and a leather jacket with that big smile of his, he looks stunning. If he can keep the other feeling good about himself, that’s just what he wants to do.

He didn’t realize all his love and kindness, all of his hugs and kisses and sweet words would end up with three words that shock him to his core.

It's a Thursday night, two weeks after exams. Bambam is fifteen, walking out of the bathroom and into his bedroom to the sight of Mark on his bed, a thick book in his lap. He is reading the book thief, and its such a heartbreaking story. 

Who knew that heartbreak was contagious.

"Hyung…" Bambam is standing in the doorway, leaning on the frame, a too large shirt on his skinny body as he looks at the blonde with this, this /look/. Mark doesn’t know what to think, how to feel with those eyes on him the way they are, because they have never looked at him like that before and he doesn’t know what to think of them. 

"Yeah Bam?", he asks, voice sounding normal as he sits up, those dark eyes on him, still the same ones he remembers seeing all those years ago the first time he held Bambam, the first time he spoke to him and heard those soft little burbles back at him.

"There's something I wanted to ask you," he says quietly, still at the doorway, and Mark nods, scooting to the side on the bed to give the younger a space to come and sit. He has never denied the other the answer to a question except if it's something sexual, in which case he simply says it's inappropriate and the other is too young to know about it, but that kind of thing has only been asked about two or three times. Slowly, the younger blonde comes over to sit at his side, their arms pressed together, and now that Mark isn't seeing the look in those eyes he can relax against Bambam, rest his cheek on the others shoulder and hum, as if to say the other can go on, but the other says nothing for a few moments. 

"Is it…weird, to like guys instead of girls?", the other asks in a tiny voice, and there is an immediate shake of Marks head, an arm snaked around the boys shoulders.

"Not at all. A lot of people don’t like it, but that’s okay. If it makes you happy and that’s who you like, then so be it."

"Do you like guys or girls?"

"Little bit of both, it just depends on the person, you know?" Bambam nods, his head now resting on top of the elder boys own, that brittle blonde hair poking at Marks cheeks and ear, but he doesn’t mind. Discomfort isn't something you tend to focus on when you are dead.

"Hyung, is it weird to like someone you have known for a really long time?", the young blonde asks, worry in his voice that the elder doesn’t quite understand, but he doesn’t question it.

"Not at all. Sometimes it takes a while to appreciate what is right in front of us, or sometimes that person changes and you grow to appreciate them more than before," he explains, rubbing the other boys back lightly, "A lot of people develop feelings for someone after years of friendship. I know I did when I was alive."

"But hyung, I've known him sense I was a child."

Mark lifts his head to look at the other male, a caring smile on his lips, and the young blonde looks worried, his lower lip being chewed on by straight white teeth. "Is it Youngjae?", he asks gently, head tilting to the side in curiosity, his bleached bangs falling in front of his eyes. He is surprised to receive a shake of the head, but simply offers another name. "Mingyu?" Another shake of the head, a harder bite to the others lip. "Jungkookie?" 

"No hyung."

"It's okay if you don’t want to tell me," he says gently, rubbing the back of the others neck gently to help soothe him, and those dark eyes are looking at him that way again, that way he can't figure out. He hasn’t seen it before, at least not that remembers.

"Keep guessing."

"Okay…Game?"

The other shakes his head, lips quirking up as he says a soft, "He has dyed blonde hair, and likes the smell of cinnamon."

"Yugyeom?"

Another shake of the head, and Mark gives up, shrugging his skinny shoulders and saying, "I don’t think I know whoever it is."

"You do."

The elder leans against the other boys side again, his cheek to Bambam's shoulder until two words come out that shatter every part of his heart, that scare him and have him disappearing from the human world in a meer instant.

"It's you."

Oh god, what the fuck has he done? HOW THE FUCK DID HE DO IT? Is it possible to kill yourself after you die, because if so, he needs to know the secret. His body falls through the bed but he doesn’t give a shit because he realizes how messed up this is, how bad he has messed up, how weird he had made the entirety of Bambam's life.

Bambam likes a fucking ghost who doesn’t age and remembers holding him as a baby.

What the fuck?

He can feel his chest caving in on nothing, a pain where his lungs are too prevent for him to even remotely function. Bambam is a child, a boy younger than he is, too young to love a dead boy, too young to love someone who should be in his forties, too young for him. How could he have let this happen, he is like the others brother, like a guardian, he could never see Bambam that way. He has seen the other at his best and worst, at his youngest and oldest. He shouldn’t love Mark, a dead man, a ghost, someone who has helped him sense childhood. He isn't sure who has more issues, himself of Bambam.

"Hyung? Hyung, where did you go?"

Bambam scrambles off the bed, standing up and looking around worriedly, his gaze passing right over Mark who is still staring at the young blonde, who can feel his fingers staring to tingle, his lungs forcing themselves to fill up when he knows he doesn’t even fucking need oxygen, his eyes starting to water. Oh god, what the hell did he do to this poor boy?

"Hyung? Mark hyung?"

The elder blonde scrambles to his feet and out of the room, down the hall and straight out the back door, ignoring the upset boy upstairs with tears in his eyes and a look of regret on his face. He can't think, can't shut up his head about how bad he fucked up to make a living boy fall in love with a dead one, about how he stayed too long, how he should have made sure to filter out of the others life when he was still young to make the other think he was just an imaginary friend. 

His hands are numb now, and he curls up under the tree in the back yard, trying to breathe and instead letting tears streak down his cheeks, fall into the air and blow away like dust on the wind. They don’t exist here. The world is cold, too cold, the warmth of the human plain of existence seeping out of his cold, dead skin and leaving him with nothing but the fridgid temperatures where he is. He can still smell Bambam's shampoo, the watermelon scented one for kids that he uses because it makes his hair soft and easy to brush in the mornings, he can still smell the others bedroom, with its little lavender plant in the window sill, and he covers his nose with his sleeves to get it out, to smell the scent of cold and plain fabric, the death in the air and on his skin when he is in this place. He cries for hours, until the moon is high in the sky and the start wink at him with their evil little eyes, as if taunting him for being a fool.

He feels so stupid, but mostly, he feels disturbed. How could a child, someone like Bambam, like a ghost, love him in any way other than a friend? How? His heart hurts, aches, screams for him to run away, go find Jackson again and tell him about this, but he can't do that after so long without speaking to the other. It's been more than thirty years. Jackson doesn’t need his bullshit.

He cries for hours, and then he walks back inside, still in his ghost realm. 

He finds Bambam on his bed, sitting up, holding his pillow and looking at the door with teary eyes. His cheeks are blotchy red, eyes puffy and rimmed in a similar shade, his fingers gripping the fabric so hard that his knuckles are white.

"Mark hyung?", he asks after the elder blonde has been standing there for several minutes, but he gets no response.

Bambam won't see him for almost three years. 

••••

It's sad, just how many panic attacks he has to watch Bambam go through, how many sleepless nights and nightmares, how many tears, but he does nothing no matter what.

When Bambam cries his name in the night, he says nothing and does nothing.

When Bambam begs to be acknowledged, he says nothing and does nothing.

When Bambam looks in the mirror and asks if he looks alright, Mark says nothing.

It's like he disappeared, but he did, in all reality, and he does respond, just in a place that he knows Bambam can't hear him. It's twisted, but he can't leave, he can't abandon the boy, can't abandon someone he has only ever wanted to guide and protect. 

By the time Bambam is sixteen, Mark is having strange thoughts, because on some level he wants to love the younger boy back, he wants to give him the kind of thing that the other seems to want, and when the once again brunette male comes home with his first boyfriend, a boy named Jinyoung, he knows he could treat him better. The parts he sees in their shared room aren't what the younger seems to want, but then again, he just wants to be loved, something Mark can't yet offer him. He sees a number of things between the two boys, rough kisses and whispered abuses, insults and touches in places he can see Bambam isn't comfortable with, and many times he doesn’t stay to see how things escalate, but he knows the night that the young brunette looses his virginity, because the next morning he can barely walk and he cries into his pillow.

Jinyoung isn't around after that.

Mark could not be happier.

By the time the younger male is sixteen he has passed Mark in height, his frame ling and thin, stunning in a way that Mark realizes he thinks of as more than platonic. The others eyes are wide and dark, although saddened by the hardships he has faced, his hair soft looking and dark in color, skin already cleared of a lot of the acne he had in his early teens, his lips plump and pink tinted. He is just gorgeous in every way, perfect and beautiful, someone that anyone could fall in love with, and Mark has found that even if it's wrong and makes no sense, he too has fallen under that spell.

It's one day when Bambam is almost eighteen that he shows up again, that the other sees him in his acne smattered, dark circle and messy haired glory, looking exactly as he did almost three years prior. He sits on Bambam's bed, still in the same spot, looking down at the bed spread with big eyes that only get wider as the door opens. For a millisecond, Mark wonders if it's Bambam's mother at the door, but then a familiar word fills the silent air and makes his hurting heart ache even more.

"Hyung?", Bambam whispers, words tiny and sounding almost broken in nature, sad and scared bit lased with bittersweet, almost broken hope.

"Hi Bam," he says back, and when his eyes lift up to see the other boy again, for the first time in a long time without that grey veiled haze over him, his breath might as well have been stolen, because eyen with welling tears in his eyes, Bambam is beautiful, an angel on earth. The younger doesn’t even respond or say hello back, as soon as it clicks that Mark is really back, he is slamming his door and darting over, hopping onto the bed and wrapping those skinny arms around Marks cold frame. He sits in the elder boys lips like he did when he was young, holds him like he might disappear if he doesn't and cries quietly into his shoulder.

"I thought you were gone, hyung, I thought I drove you away," the younger whimpers as Mark hugs him back, holds his skinny frame as he shakes like a leaf. He is so thin, thinner than he thought, but there is strength in his hold and that makes Mark a little happier than not. "Oh god, I'm so happy your back. Please, please, never leave again. I need you," he continues in a voice that sounds broken, like he has seen hell without Mark there, and in some ways he had. It's something the elder-- well, now the younger-- regrets greatly. 

"I won't. Promise," he whispers into that soft hair, and it smells exactly the same as it always did, like watermelon, soft and cool against his nose and lips. "I'm right here, there's nothing to worry about."

Bambam cries into his neck for a while, and Mark is reminded of how he did the exact same thing in the weeks and months after his fathers death, and then about how his own father is probably dead at this point. By the time the other has calmed, the fabric of his dark hoodie is dampened and Bambam's eyes puffy, rimmed in a bright red to match the irritated red at the tops of his cheekbones. When the other sits up, he is taller than Mark now, but that’s just fine by him, because he can just reach up to run gentle fingers over the others eyes to collect left over tears. It helps that Bambam bends down a little, but then he asks a question that turns his tongue dry.

"Hyung, why did you leave me?", the younger asks in a tiny voice, something soft and reminding him of when the other was a child, the very thing he intends to explain.

"I was…scared, by the thought that you liked me that way," he says softly, looking down, and he can practically feel Bambam deflating in his lap, as though he held out hope for another explanation for why he had simply disappeared. 

"I'm sorry. I know it's…weird, and probably not okay but-"

"The heart wants what it wants, right?" 

Two sets of dark eyes meet and then there are arms around his head, hugging it to Bambam's chest as a nose presses to his hair, moving as though the brunette is nodding quickly. 

"I don’t want anything of it. I'm fine if you don’t like me hyung, just please don’t leave me again. All I want is to have you here again, to fall asleep with you at my side and hear your voice when I'm sad, to check on you on your bad days and let you help me through mine. Please, I don’t care if you don’t love me that way, or if it's fucked up, I need you hyung, I'm not okay without you," the other rushes against brittle blonde locks, and Mark holds the boy tightly, a quiet affirmation that does little to soothe the other.

"Is…is it bad that I've started to…to like you to," Mark whispers against the taller males chest, finding himself in a state of vulnerability, like he is too young for the other to be seeing him as his hyung anymore. Bambam is no longer a child, he still seems like one but Mark is younger, he is small and has less real world experience now, and its weird, this situation is weird and fucked up.

"I don’t care if it is."

"We…we don’t have to change how things were before…right?"

"Not at all."

"Thank you." It's a huge relief.

That night Bambam falls asleep in his arms, and the next night its the other way around, which makes Mark realize how much he missed being held.

Maybe this fucked up thing they have isn't so bad.

••••

Life moves along nicely, slowly, the both of them falling into a rhythm neither ever forgot, forehead kisses to the elder and help with makeup in the mornings, struggles to get Bambam out of bed and whines when he could, brushed teeth and breakfasts made until one day the younger decides to move, to head to Seoul and go to college.

Their routine continues there too, once everything is packed and unpacked in a new space, Bambam's eighteenth birthday coming and going before either realize it, a dorm filled with two boys, one with a heartbeat and the other without. While the brunette struggles with classes and even brushing his teeth in the morning, Mark takes care of the little things, dishes and laundry, dinners, the trash, sitting up on late nights so that the other has company and making convenience store runs when the elder needs him too. He is studying to be a neurologist, something he doesn’t really want to be but knows will keep him going for the rest of his life and offer early retirement, and whenever the other feels like he just wants to give up, Mark is there with quiet assurances and soft reprieves from the lines of words on the pages below him.

Three years pass by, ones filled with happy smiles and whispered assurances, days flowing together as Bambam grows up, gets drunk for the first time and acts like a child again, stumbling around and whining about how alcohol tastes bad. The next morning the other can't even stand up his hangover is that bad, and Mark ends up reading to him until he falls asleep again, stroking the soft hair at the top of his head in kind little circles.

"Hyung, have you ever gotten drunk before?"

"No, I died too young for that."

"Can you imagine wanting to die but it's because you have knives in your head?"

"Yes, I can. Is that how you feel at the moment?"

"No, I feel like there is a chainsaw in my head."

••••

Mark ends up with a truly broken heart twice in those next three years.

Once with the death of Caitlyn Stark in Game if Thrones, and once with the death of Bambam. 

The first is self explanatory if you have flipping watched game of thrones, but the second one is the one that truly hurt, that truly left him dead inside and with nothing to keep going for.

It was just a normal night, after Bambam's first year of exams, which he nailed and got through with flying colors, the elder male deciding to celebrate by getting a little tipsy, his skinny frame sprawled across Marks lap as they watch some movie, the adaptation of the book thief in fact, and when the younger gets up to go to the bathroom, he thinks nothing of it, getting lost in the show for far too long before he realizes that Bambam isn't back.

Maybe he went to bed without telling him, or misspoke and went out to get something. Still, he stands up, walking to the bathroom to check on him and being greeted with a sight that makes his vision filter and go strange at its edges, colorful yet dark, spots crossing his vision and shooting across his eyes at a sight he hoped he would never see. 

Bambam, flat on his back, head cracked against the bathtub, far from living. If he could throw up, he would have in that instant, his hands shaking as they grip the door. He stares so long that there is no doubt the other isn't breathing, that his skin has begun to go cold and those lungs will never take another breath in to get the others blood flowing. He falls to his knees, tile slamming into his the ground so hard that the pain jars up his thighs and into his stomach, empty for years now, his own skin freezing cold as he sits there in shock, staring at his beautiful boy for too long and not long enough, his mind unable to fathom it yet knowing that it is fully true. 

They never kissed, not really. The brunette had once accidentally hit his lips instead of his nose and earned a blushing face from Mark, but he would give anything to be a blushing mess in front of Bambam again. 

When he crawled over, he isn't sure, but he lifts the others head up gently, letting blood coat his fingers in a familiar way as he begins to cry, to fold his skinny frame around Bambam's vaguely warm one and cry into his knees, tears that never reach a tiled floor and fade away like dust in a dry wind, lifted away and forgotten. How it happened, he has no clue, but it did and he can't handle it, can't handle the red on his skin or on his cheeks as he tries desperately to wipe at his tears and have some remembrance that they exist, but they dry on his hoodie and disappear quickly, leaving him with blood streaked cheeks dragged through by salty water. 

"Please don’t leave me. I need you. God, how I need you. Please don’t go," he cries quietly, lifting that beautiful face to press his face to the top of his head, to soft hair and slowly drying blood from where his skull cracked against porcelain. There is more blood on his face, but he doesn’t care in the slightest, because his Bambam is gone, his little Bambam, the light of his after-life, and he has no reason to be left a ghost like Mark. He didn’t take his own life, that much is clear, and he couldn’t have died unhappy. He passed his exams, his mother had said she was proud and his life was going well.

He has no reason to come back for Mark.

It takes hours for him to calm down, to fall limp at Bambam's side and burry his face against the other boys soft tummy, smearing it in blood but he can't seem to care. He just wants Bambam back.

That’s not how it goes though. 

It takes two days for Mingyu to come over and find the brunette dead on his bathroom floor, plates smashed across the kitchen and left in shattered bits on the ground greeting the purple haired boy, along with a disaster area in the living room, things broken in every place from anger and sadness at the loss of his love. He feels bad for the purple haired boy, for the way that he finds the home and Bambam, for the lack of explanation and the horrid sight of a best friend dead on the floor. 

A week after Bambam dies, he comes back, walks through the door with hesitant eyes to find Mark crying on the bed, curled into a little ball, his body shaking with quiet sobs that ring out in the silence like church bells. There is a weight on the bed, one that pulls his skinny frame back from the edge, but he doesn’t move. Whoever it is, he doesn’t care about the consequences, he doesn’t care about anything anymore, he just misses Bambam.

"Hyung?", someone whispers, and he sits up so hard that he almost smacks into the brunette he misses so much, a soft smile on his lips before Mar barried his face into the others shoulder, hugs him as tightly as he can, now crying against his skin.

"You're not supposed to he a ghost."

"I know."

"Is it bad that I'm glad you are?"

"Not at all."


End file.
